Is MoT being excessively secretive?

On January 27th this year I submitted an Official Information Act request to the Ministry of Transport for any papers, briefing or other documents they held or had prepared since 1 March 2010 on the following matters:

• The Auckland CBD Rail Link project
• The Auckland Rail Electrification project
• The Puhoi-Wellsford road of national significance
• The Auckland integrated ticketing project

After much to-ing and fro-ing over the scope of the request, as the MoT were keen to narrow it down a bit so that it didn’t end up being thousands of documents, the request was narrowed to “all advice and briefings to the Minister of Transport since 1 March 2010 on the four topics listed above. After that I waited, as the timelines for the OIA request were first extended, and then the day they were supposed to be provided to me (even with the OIA extension) came and went (March 18th). A week after that date I contacted Barry Kidd – the general manager for roads and rail – to enquire what on earth was going on.

A few days later I was contacted by another staff member to say the final touches were being put on the response – and then finally, today, I received the information. By my calculations that’s around 14 working days overdue, meaning that the response has taken around two and a half times as long as it really should have (20 working days). Considering the extraordinarily long delay in getting this response, I figured that they’d probably be sending me boxes of information.

But I was wrong, in fact most of what I asked for has been withheld. Here’s a copy of the letter I got in reply. It notes the documents that have been released to me in full:

Most of this is fairly boring stuff – advice for speeches or other papers that I have already seen in the past. There’s also a fairly lengthy list of documents that were released in part, usually with the most interesting bits withheld: Once again there are a few interesting things in here – and I’m willing to scan in, email or write future blog posts on any of these documents that people think might be particularly interesting. A lot of these released documents has been withheld though, frustratingly. It’s also a bit strange that the Minister has released no advice whatsoever on the Puhoi-Wellsford Road: maybe because that’s an NZTA project the Ministry of Transport is excluded from discussions on it?

Annoyingly, it’s the third list that seems the longest – the list of documents completely withheld from release:

In addition to these documents, a whole mass of weekly updates from the Ministry have also been fully withheld.

Obviously some documents should be withheld, and I see a few of those outlined above such as details on foreign exchange hedging. But it seems that MoT have gone completely over the top in withholding so much information. Surely there is a strong public interest in finding out about the MoT’s analysis of “Key Facts” of the CBD Rail Tunnel, or details on the direction of the next Government Policy Statement for transport funding. Furthermore, many of the MoT’s weekly transport briefings surely contain parts that could have been released. It just seems that, despite the masses of time they had to process the OIA request, in the end they’ve been lazy and unnecessarily secretive.

I might need to work out how to complain to the Office of the Ombudsman.

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